The Wreath

Naomi Falk

Seven silver ribbons in the sky over the field, while I’m trailing my fingers across the crushed cornstalks. Stooping down toward the earth, knocking on the dirt to see what may rise. Ear to the ground now, all seasons turn below. Dormant equinoxes and unpromised ones to come, shifting bedrock down there, somewhere even further off I sense the liquid core’s magnetic field beginning to winter, toil stalling, a final serenity come upon us at last. Nothing I haven’t heard before. I rap my palm on the dirt once more and all grows quiet. The flattened parts of my corn field compose some larger imprinted shapes that I’ve yet to decipher, though I’ve been wandering, though I’ve been tracing their boundaries with the heavens in mind. No one else here to witness but the remaining crop. They tell me nothing but I perceive their agony, their mercy at the hands of a colossal slaughter. The shapes are of no geometric disposition; not like before; not making me think of data and numbers but of finality and ruin. They seem almost cruel in their complex, rhythmic beauty. The aqueous boundaries flooding acres and acres. The others and I used to document it all, tormented by our need to create meaning out of these vast designs. Mapping dreams. Poring over old documents and rare manuscripts about our undetected visitors. In the early decades of the world wide internet, before its oligarchical consolidation, the screen led us through intricate systems of forums and emails, digitized archives and discourse. I mourn the loss of our liquid light that tethered me to strangers. Blazing across time and history on my computer through the night, questing for knowledge and a cause and effect. That was when there was thorough resolve as to which formations were made by us and which by them. But all cobwebs now, all servers forsworn and corrupt. Eventually destroyed. Severed realities, no longer investigating potential loopholes in frequencies, but abandoned for good… So what of these unrecognizable patterns? Their jagged edges and unusual corners? Maybe means to offering a stoic goodbye from beyond. To us? Less melancholia; more reluctance. Self ever wavering between ego and shadow. No future years to continue envisioning the outer world. Back on my porch, I pry the weathered skin from the edge of my nailbeds. On the front door behind me, I regard the final flowers on my wreath, which began blooming just three days ago. And though it would seem auspicious, their colors appear as bloodless corpse, wraith, just a phantom of nature’s offerings. They shudder under my touch, grow sticky under the few hours of solar embrace. Harmonic universe’s strings detaching us all, I suppose, from the old promise of sustenance. All of a sudden it begins to snow, over on the hills. And something coming this way, larger than the rise of horizons surrounding. Lanky and lean. For a moment I recall a video game we used to play, with a mage’s college on the northwest top of a frostbitten peak. Overlooking a boundless arctic sea beyond. Perpetually enrobed in ice. A land where wars waged had some finite ending, in which even convoluted land grabbing and imperialism was enchaptered. In the haze of my daydream, I recall that my wandering thoughts can now be boundless, because this will all be done soon. Never one to believe in fate; but it now arrives to earth’s doorstep in funereal procession. The lanky figure surfaces through the wall of yonder snow, swinging a scythe as a pendulum before its feet. Taller than the trees. A low hum comes in waves across the field, not quite a voice, no, but what? Song of an earlier time, the small, elongated drama of my life turned inward over just some decades, toward provincial and so small. No one left to know me. Parting from here as I am, with the promise of an eternal riddle. The hum stirs velvet in the air, caress of expulsion, the dust rises and rises. My field no longer mine, perhaps handed over years ago. Long, low waves, slicing granite over the crust of the earth.

Naomi Falk is a writer, editor, and book designer. She is the production and design director of powerHouse Books, the senior editor of Archway Editions, Mina Hamedi’s co-founder of the goth art magazine NAUSIKÂE NYC, and periodically publishes experimental artist monographs under the moniker Crop Circle Press. Her bookmaking practices are informed by her years working in the Publications Department of The Museum of Modern Art and as the founding editorial director of Ki Smith Gallery, where she wrote, designed, printed, and bound over fifteen exhibition catalogues and artist books. Her first book entitled THE SURRENDER OF MAN will be published in Spring 2025 by Inside the Castle.